There are many known techniques for generating three-dimensional images of a surrounding environment. Methods referred to as “360 panorama”, “Panoramic stereo imaging” and “omnivergent imaging” concern distinct techniques for creating such three-dimensional images. Some techniques utilize one or more image capturing devices, e.g., cameras or other input source, to define stereo images corresponding to an environment about the image capturing devices.
For example, the conference paper Stereo panorama with a single camera, Peleg and Ben-Ezra, in Proc. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conf., pp. 395-401 (1999), discusses creating mosaic images from a rotating camera, dealing with incident problems of parallax and scale changes, and using a single camera to create two stereo panoramic views, one for each eye, through multiple viewpoint image projections.
The paper Stereo reconstruction from multiperspective panoramas, Heung-Yeung Shum and Richard Szeliski, in IEEE Int'l Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 14-21 vol. 1 (1999), discusses computing depth maps from a collection of images, where camera motion is constrained to planar concentric circles. The resulting collection of regular perspective images is sampled into a set of multiple perspective panoramas, and depth maps can be computed from the sampled images.
The conference paper Omnivergent Stereo by Heung-Yeung Shum, and Seitz, in IEEE Int'l Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 22-29 vol. 1 (1999), discusses a virtual sensor for 3D image construction, where instead of using planar perspective images that collect many rays at a fixed viewpoint, omnivergent cameras are instead used to collect a small number of selected rays at many different viewpoints. The collected 2D manifold of rays is arranged into two multiple-perspective images allowing for stereo reconstruction, and, according to the authors, 3D models can be reconstructed with minimal error since every point in the model is defined with respect to two rays having maximum vergence angle. However, this document fails to teach how a physical capture device can be created to implement the techniques discussed in the document.
It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that these three references are presented for exemplary purposes to illustrate current state of the art, and to show lack of knowledge in the art as to how to effectively build an omnivergent stereo image capture device not suffering from limitations discussed in these references.